Europe 24 - Rome, Day 2

One of the lovely things about staying in apartments is that you can ease into the day with your own breakfast without having to find it in a café. Not that a café is necessarily a bad thing – especially in Italy, where pastry is an art form – but it does require a fair amount of motion and alertness. When you have a kitchen to work with, though, you can do a bit of grocery shopping the day before – something I actually enjoy, especially in new places where I can see what they have in the markets – and then roll directly in from bed to table at whatever pace you wish.

Since we had raided the corner grocery store the day before we had everything we needed to do this, and thus enjoyed a nice breakfast of meats, cheeses, fruits, and assorted other things right there. I’d bought a chunk of gorgonzola to spread on crackers, in fact, and since nobody else in the family likes gorgonzola it was all mine, all mine. I feasted on that for a couple of mornings.

We didn’t have anything firmly planned until the evening, so we decided to take the 3 Tram to visit some of the many churches in Rome, starting with one that Kim, Lauren, and I had been to before but somehow not Oliver. This had to be corrected. Since this meant I would get to see it again, I was all in. It was a quick ride and a hot walk, but soon we were there.

St. Cecelia’s in Trastevere is perhaps my favorite church in Rome, even if it doesn’t really look like much from the outside.

Nothing looks like much from the outside in Rome, though. That’s one of the great mysteries of the place. In the US the outsides of buildings correlate with the insides – if one is shabby, the other probably is as well. But in Rome even the most gorgeous Renaissance jewels look half abandoned from the street. St. Cecelia’s isn’t run down – far from it – but the outside genuinely does not prepare you for the inside at all.

Like most such churches it has a wealth of art for you to look at as you slowly make your way around the place. Everywhere you turn there’s more of it.

The piece I enjoyed most, though was this memorial to one of the priests who served here a very long time ago. I know it’s supposed to be a funeral monument, but if you look closely it just looks like he’s bored and now I have another photo for my ever-expanding “this could be my profile picture” file.

If that were all there were to St. Cecelia it would hardly be remarkable. Things like this are common in the heartland of the Catholic Church and the Renaissance, after all. No, the key to this place is that once you have explored the church itself you can then make your way back to the gift shop – a tiny room in the back, by the main entryway – pay the €2.50 fee, and head down the stairs to the basement.

It doesn’t look like much at first – a dusty basement with some interesting artifacts but again, nothing all that special.

And then you make your way to the end of the hall and make the right turn into the underground chapel, and suddenly you are in one of the most beautiful spaces in the world.

There’s almost never anyone there so you have the place to yourself most of the time you’re there. They have chairs where you can just sit and take it all in. It’s a place that makes you want to speak in hushed tones even if you get up and walk around. The mosaics are astonishing, even if the photos don’t really do them justice. It’s just a marvelous place.

But eventually you have to leave, and our next mission was to start our Bernini hunt.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born in Naples in 1598 and spent most of his life in Rome, where he became one of the greatest and most prolific sculptors of his age as well as an accomplished architect, painter, and playwright before he died in 1680. He enjoyed the patronage of many of the popes of that era – especially those of the Barberini family – and you can find his sculptures all over the city. We decided we’d try to see some of them, whenever we could.

A short walk from St. Cecelia’s was the church of St. Francesco a Ripa, built in the 1600s and dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi who once stayed at the adjacent convent. It is also the home of Bernini’s statue of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, whom I’d never heard of but who was apparently known enough to warrant such a statue.

The church itself is similar to St. Cecelia’s inasmuch as a rather austere exterior quickly gives way to a stunning interior full of paintings, sculptures, and stained glass. It’s rather more ornate than St. Cecelia’s and there is a much more pronounced emphasis on a theme of death – the bottom photo below with the skeleton figure at the top being just one of the more obvious signs of that – but in general it’s of a piece.

And then you get to the Blessed Ludovica statue, and you understand why Bernini was so famous.

Really, what else can you say?

Our next stop was San Nicolo in Carcere, a quick bus ride away, though once we got there we spent a short bit of time exploring the archeological site across the street because these things are just everywhere in Rome and you might as well look at them. It is a wonder how anything gets done in that city with all the history and archeology there, though it is at least somewhat true that this is precisely why not much gets done sometimes. They’ve been trying to build a third subway line in Rome for decades now, for example, but every time they put a shovel into the ground they find some astonishing archeological treasure and have to stop for a while. Apparently the running joke in Rome is that they’ve been working on that subway line for so long that archeologists are now exploring the initial construction sites for that subway line. But we don’t really have archeological sites just sitting out in the open for passersby to explore in Wisconsin so we were intrigued and stopped to investigate.

San Nicolo in Carcere – literally, “St. Nicholas in Prison” – is what you get when multiple religious buildings happen at one site over a very long period. At street level it is a church, or actually several churches. The one you see when you’re looking at it from across the street was built in 1599, but that sits on top of an older church that was built sometime around 1000CE and that one may have replaced an even older on from around the 6th century CE. The churches, in turn, sit on top of the ruins of three Roman temples in what was – a quick internet search reveals – the Forum Holitorium. Three columns from one of them – the Temple of Janus – were incorporated into the walls of the 10th century church and remain visible in the 1599 church as well.

Like all of these churches, it’s lovely inside.

But if you look carefully at the first picture above, you’ll see – just behind the kneeler in front of the railing – a set of low wooden doors. Those lead down into the basement, and for a small fee you can go down and explore the ruins of the old Roman temples.

It’s kind of dark and twisty down there, and if you didn’t know at least some of the story you’d probably not think much of it. But once you realize what’s actually there it is rather cool. This is true in both the figurative sense of the feeling you get walking around in something ancient and the literal sense of it being in a basement shielded from the day’s heat.

We took the 718 Bus back to Testaccio after that and by the time we got off we were hungry for lunch. Eventually we found a little takeout place not far from our apartment – the sort of place that has food behind a counter and you point to it and they put it in little containers for you. We handed them our Allergy Cards and they spent some time deciding what was safe and what wasn’t, which we appreciated – they were very kind – and eventually we walked out with two orders of lasagna, a couple of meatballs, and a frittata, which we made short work of once we got back.

There followed a siesta, though Kim took a short trip to the corner grocery. It was at this point that we realized that the Summer Olympics had started, so we fired up the television and watched what Italian TV decided to show us, which turned out to be a fairly entertaining soccer game. It was a nice break.

We actually did have plans for the evening, as opposed to just meandering around the city, and the first step in those plans was to go to La Botticella a Testaccio, just around the corner from the apartment. This was the first place Kim and I ate in Rome on our first trip there, and perhaps for that reason it remains my favorite restaurant there. It’s a neighborhood place, where nobody speaks English, the person taking your order is probably the owner, and most of the people eating alongside you live nearby. The food is wonderful and inexpensive, and they’ve always treated us well. We got there on the early side, not long after they opened at 7pm, and got a sidewalk table. I had my cacio e pepe and was a happy diner indeed.

The reason we were there so early is because we were going to a concert that evening. Back when we were planning this trip – or, more accurately, when Kim was planning this trip and asking me and Oliver for input – we discovered that the Opera Theater of Rome had an outdoor series of concerts at the Baths of Caracalla, a Roman ruin a few tram stops away from our apartment. We had our choice of events. One night was Tosca, by Puccini. Another night was Turandot, also by Puccini. And a third night was a tribute to George Gershwin, featuring Rhapsody in Blue. Kim was leaning toward one of the Puccini nights – “Italian opera in Italy!” – but she made the mistake of asking me what I wanted and, well, Rhapsody in Blue is the single greatest piece of American music ever composed and if you give me a choice that’s where I’m going to go almost regardless of what the other choices are. Oliver agreed and Kim graciously went along with that, with the proviso that if we enjoyed it enough perhaps we could see if there would be tickets left for one of the Puccini nights. In the end the Gershwin was enough. It was a lovely night.

We made our way to the Marmorata stop and caught the 3 Tram heading in the opposite direction from earlier that day, away from Trastavere. It was full of concert-goers, so finding our way from the stop to the Baths of Caracalla was simply a matter of following the crowd until someone asked for our tickets and directed us up the long path past the ruins and then left into the seating area.

We had pretty good seats, it turned out – right in the middle, about halfway back. The concert started at 9:30pm to try to allow the day to cool off, a noble plan that almost but not quite worked. It was still hot and the crowd made it hotter, but it was a festive crowd and people were happy to be there.

Eventually the musicians wandered onstage and warmed up, and then the maestro – a man named Wayne Marshall, who would go on both to conduct the orchestra and play the piano part to Rhapsody in Blue, appeared.

It was a very, very long concert, featuring not only the title song but several other Gershwin pieces and one by Leonard Bernstein for some reason, but a really good one. Without consulting each other, we all ended up focusing on the percussionist way over on stage right who seemed to be having a grand time of it, but the whole thing was wonderful. It ended well after midnight and then we walked back past the ruins to the tram stop.

The tram was a long time coming and for a while we were the only people waiting, which is a somewhat unnerving experience when you’re in an unfamiliar city and not sure if you’re at the right place or if the trams have stopped running for the night, but eventually other people joined us. Kim ended up talking with a woman named Diana, an American expat who lives in Rome and works in the film industry now. Diana was impressed that we’d gone to the show. “Not many tourists go to concerts,” she said.

We made it back to the apartment around 1:30 or so and collapsed, tired but happy, into our beds.